Fundamentalists sure got in a tizzy over the fantasy in Harry Potter. So I was wondering, when Lord of the Rings came out, was there a negative reaction from Christian and Jewish fundamentalists then?
It was written by a religiously ultraconservative and devout Catholic. Not the Mel Gibson type, but staunchly oldschool. He kept the Lord of the Rings essentially free of religion. He definitely used inspiration from certain Christian concepts in writing his cosmology of Arda, mostly in the Ainulindalë. But he worked and reworked the Christian material until it was no longer overtly Christian at all, but was a cosmology and mythology which could comport well with Christianity in a general sense, if you wanted it to. The Valar could be read as archangels (with a Christian mindset) or gods and goddesses (with a Pagan mindset), but manage to be remarkably free of sticky ties to real-world theologies for any material so religiously inspired.
Tolkein received a pass from fundamentalist because of his long standing relationship with C.S. Lewis, who is revered by fundamentalist for his portrayal of Christ in the figure of the lion Aslan.
Rowling on the other hand, wrote her first book, while living off the dole in England, which is considered a no-no, by conservative fundamentalists.
Some, sure, though it was a matter of some debate (notice C.S. Lewis takes some fire here as well). But lots of Christians of somewhat greater imagination have no trouble.
I think the big problem that Christian fundamentalists have with the Harry Potter series is that magic and wizardry are being used for good as well as for evil purposes. In their theology (based on some texts in the Bible) magic and wizardry are intrinsically evil – and that view is reasonably consistent with the supernatural elements in the Lord of the Rings series.
There is this (not that it makes any sense but then Fundies rarely do):
This is surprising (or maybe not):
All this tells me is that alot of fundamentalist are not consistent thinkers and selectively apply their bias.
The whole premise of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is a magical piece of furniture which transports young children to an enchanted universe where they fight evil. That’s okay, but Harry Potter fighting evil sorcerers is not. :shrug:
From my first link above,
Well, when LOTR first came out, fundamentalists completely ignored it. Just like pretty much everyone else ignored it. It didn’t get really popular until a decade after it was published. At which point (late 1960s), culture wars weren’t about Christian versus satanists but True Americans versus latte-drinking, I mean, dope-smoking hippies. OK well, maybe things haven’t completely changed, but fundamentalists weren’t condemning books for being satanic at that point; they were still condemning books for having swear words or acknowledging that sex happens. Now LOTR has lots of people getting bloodily disemboweled and tortured and murdered, but pretty much pretends sex doesn’t exist, so the Christians were basically OK with it (except for the generic objection to ‘escapist fantasy’ which isn’t really a religious objection).
The Narnia series presents a rather different issue, since the magical elements really aren’t that important to the story, but the whole Aslan thing clearly mirrors the death and resurrection of Christ: C.S. Lewis was writing a Christian allegory far more obviously than J.R.R. Tolkien was, and religion is pretty irrelevant to Rowling’s world. So it’s hard for fundamentalists to be upset about what is so clearly a retelling of the central myth of Christianity. (But, of course, some still don’t like it: Lewis clearly is not a fundamentalist, and he uses a lot of pagan elements in the Narnia books.)
My father objected to both Lord of the Rings and Narnia, and pretty much all other fantasy, on religious grounds. Thankfully, my mother is more sane.
But a lot of fundamentalist don’t approve of Catholics, either.
the great Irony here is that modern day fundamentalist Christian practice is chock full of pagan elements not found or even condemned in the Bible.
A story of a resurrection in the midst of lots of pagan stuff going on? If this is anti-christian, then the bible is anti-christian itself.
No freaking way!
A Fundamentalist would view this as a shade away from a frank admission of his taste for the flesh of unborn children, considered as a testimony to his respectability as a human being.
Tolkien seemed to have been saved from the scorn heaped on Rowling by two things: His books were largely ignored at the time they were new, and the Fundamentalist sects we deal with now must not have existed at the time. Which leads me to wonder, when did they begin?
Remember that Harry Potter, despite the magic, ostensibly takes place in the real world. Maybe that has something to do with it.
There is some basic misunderstanding of American religious history in the OP. First of all, there has not been a uniform amount of public display of Christian revivalism in American life. (It was always there under the surface, but it wasn’t out there in public as much.) There have been four major waves where Christians were outspoken in American public life, each about 90 years apart:
The First Great Awakening in about 1730
The Second Great Awakening in about 1820
The Fundamentalist Movement in about 1910
The Religious Right in about 2000
The Lord of the Rings came out in 1954 and 1955, and this was a low point in Christian revivalism in the U.S. They weren’t making any big deal about any particular book at the time. The 1950’s were generally not a period of religious controversy in the U.S. Oh, it was assumed that you went to church or synagogue or whatever, but it was considered distinctly low-class to make a big deal of your faith.
Second, the brouhaha about the Harry Potter books was possible only because they were getting immense amounts of publicity as they were published. Why would Fundamentalists waste their time complaining about The Lord of the Rings, which was very little known for the first decade after it was published? The counter-reaction that The Lord of the Rings has gotten only came in the 2000’s, after the Harry Potter books came out (and the same is true of The Chronicles of Narnia). There was no Christian reaction to The Lord of the Rings in the 1950’s.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t call Tolkien ultraconservative in any sense. Yes, he was a devout Catholic. I can’t think of any way in which he was more religiously reactionary than any random devout British Catholic of the time.
I can. He was reluctant to change with the times:
When my family visited Kentucky in 1971, they introduced me to a woman who had read The Lord of the Rings. I was considered unusual for having read it (way back then), and it seemed natural for me to meet someone who was unusual in the same way. She said, in her Kentucky drawl, “Oh that’s the hippies’ Bible.” That was all she’d say about it. “That’s the hippies’ Bible.”
The passage you quote, Johanna, is by a writer named Bradley Birzer, and I don’t consider him to be a very good scholar of Tolkien. (How, you might ask, could I know who is a good scholar of Tolkien? Well, since 1972 I’ve belonged to the Mythopoeic Society, a major scholarly organization for Inklings study. I’ve gone to their annual conferences since 1977, and I chaired the conference in 1994. I just got back from the annual conference this week. I’ve never published or lectured on Tolkien, I admit, but I do have some knowledge of who are the important Tolkien scholars.) Will you at least accept my claim that there is some doubt as to Birzer’s credibility on this subject? Birzer wants very much to emphasize the Catholic nature of The Lord of the Rings. He’s willing to overstate his case, I think. In any case, I don’t think that being unhappy with the new mass (assuming that that really happened) is sufficient to make him an ultra-conservative.
(Oh, and since 1987 I’ve belong to the (British) Tolkien Society.)
I remember a certain amount of the same attitude toward Tolkien as you do. I occasionally would see Tolkien portrayed as a hero to hippies in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. On the other hand, I grew up in a rural area where people didn’t read that much, and I don’t remember then as ever having an opinion, good or bad, about Tolkien.